


Irreligious Convictions

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Primeval
Genre: Atheist Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 09:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3285485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lorraine has always felt out of place at church services, but some things should be done – for decency’s sake, if nothing else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Irreligious Convictions

**Author's Note:**

> Luka beta'd this.

            Lorraine doesn’t even know why she’s here. Nobody else is, and nobody would blame her if she didn’t go, except herself. But Lorraine made a commitment to go to all the funerals, and that means _all_ the funerals, including the one she had to organise herself.

 

            Oliver Leek had no family, or none that Lorraine could find, which translates in practical terms to none at all. He had no known religious or atheistic convictions, so Lorraine went with the Church of England, which had been the middle way since Queen Elizabeth I and clearly didn’t intend to stop now. She told the priest a pack of lies, paid for the funeral with the remains of Leek’s money, gave the rest to the conservation charities Stephen Hart used to support and made sure that everyone in the office knew when the sad little memorial was going to be.

 

            After all that, she would have felt bad if she hadn’t have turned up – so here she is. She has just sat through her third church service in ten years, and despite the solemn occasion she feels nothing but boredom and a strange dislocation from the world around her. She’s at a murderer’s funeral, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she feels odd. 

 

            She gets up from the pew as the service ends, wrapping her old black trench-coat around her, and follows the priest out to the tiny grave waiting for an urn full of ashes. There had been very little of Leek left, once the predators were done, so what was left has been cremated. What’s in that urn is probably mostly Leek’s suit, which the predators wouldn’t have eaten. Lorraine thinks about this as she stands there, and the priest speaks.

 

            _Dust to dust and ashes to ashes_... Lorraine knows the words, they’re not precisely uncommon cultural references, but until last Thursday and the first funeral, she’d never heard them for real before.

 

            She realises that she’s staring emptily at the small, plain marker that gives nothing but Oliver’s name and his dates when the priest taps her gently on the shoulder and makes her jump and panic.

 

            “Sorry,” she says when the priest backs away carefully. “I – You startled me.”  


            “I saw,” the priest says. He’s relatively young and relatively tactful; Lorraine feels grateful to him, because he’s taken the fact that a funeral was being organised for someone who had never lived in his parish by a dyed-in-the-wool humanist very calmly and gracefully. He has not tried to offer Lorraine religion as a comfort, even though she knows that he thinks she is grieving, and that he has a vague, faint idea that something very bad has happened to her. “Did you know him well?”

 

            Lorraine tries to think of a suitable response to that. _I hated him; he was sleazy, a toady, a cheat and a liar. Still, I never suspected him of being a murderer, and I wish I hadn’t had to see him die._ That’s what she wants to say, but she doesn’t feel it’s appropriate. Not here. It wouldn’t look right and it would probably contravene the Official Secrets Act.

 

She decides on an answer and clears her throat. “We were colleagues, but not close.”

 

The priest nods, and says rather cautiously: “Is someone coming to take you home? Can I offer you a cup of tea or something?”

 

“It’s kind of you to offer, but I’m not looking for religious pastoral care.”

 

“I know. I really did mean just a cup of tea. I find a bit of space to catch your breath after a weighty occasion like a funeral is often very useful to those attending.” The priest looks down at Oliver Leek’s mortal remains, such of them that aren’t splattered across the walls of his deathtrap. “This was a very compassionate act, Miss Wickes, to arrange a funeral for someone you hardly knew and go to it even though you’re a non-believer.”

 

“Thank you,” Lorraine says. The words are empty and dull, because Lorraine isn’t doing this out of compassion. She’s doing it out of a need for tidiness, a need to tie up all the loose ends, and perhaps out of a need for atonement. She watched Oliver Leek die and did nothing. The least she can do now is bury him.

 

The priest coughs. “I’ll leave you to it. If you do feel like you need someone to talk to, the number is on the parish noticeboard in the vestry, and I promise no pamphlets.”

 

Lorraine lets out a chuckle in acknowledgement of the joke, and the priest goes away.

           

            She doesn’t know why she’s standing here. She doesn’t know why she came in the first place, except that what happened at the ARC has left an empty space in her heart and filled it with nightmares, and she needs a way to find closure.

 

            The wind is very biting for the time of year. Lorraine does not button up her coat against it, because she thinks it is good that she can feel something, even if it’s only the weather.

 

            She crosses her arms and lets out a long breath. Should she have brought flowers? She didn’t bring flowers. She took flowers to the other two funerals and she will take them to the next sixteen, but not this one. It didn’t feel appropriate, but now she feels like, if she had something to put on the grave, it would be easier to leave. And since her feet are currently rooted to the grass, Lorraine would appreciate something to make it easier to leave.

 

            “I suppose I should say goodbye,” she tells the marker (carefully chosen to be completely different from Stephen Hart’s. Lorraine won’t have them associated in death in any way, because such an association would be oddly indelible). She kicks the ground with sensible black shoes she’s already decided to throw away after this sequence of memorial services.

 

            Groucho Marx said he danced on Hitler’s grave and it didn’t help. Lorraine doubts that dancing on the grave of someone who was, by comparison, a petty criminal, would do any good at all.

 

            Furthermore, Lorraine reflects, she can’t dance.

 

            She purses her lips, stares down at the grave, and wonders what comes next. What would she say to Oliver Leek, if he was here right now?

 

            That shakes an idea loose, and she licks her lips and speaks. “I hated you,” she tells the shade of a colleague. “You _bastard_ , you couldn’t stop at lying and cheating, you killed _eighteen people_ out of greed and spite.” She pauses. Her breathing has gone out of control and her voice has risen unacceptably. A woman with a pushchair is staring over the graveyard wall at her. Lorraine takes a moment to compose herself, and then adds: “But you didn’t deserve to die like that.” She swallows hard. “Nobody deserves to die like that.”

 

            She stares at the grave for a moment longer and shakes her head, segueing rather abruptly into the slow-burning anger hiding at the back of her mind, where it’s mostly drowned by grief and fear. “I wish I could believe you had _one moment’s_ regret for what you did,” she says, her voice vicious in a way she doesn’t recognise, and turns on her heel and leaves.

 

            She’s said what she came here to say. 


End file.
